Boehner offer puts Obama on spot

President Barack Obama may get the clean debt limit extension he’s been demanding, but it wouldn’t be a clean victory.

By adopting the House GOP plan to raise the debt ceiling, Obama would avoid a potentially crippling blow to the economy and, in the White House’s view, finally break Republicans of their habit of seeking concessions each time the debt ceiling needs to be raised.

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But the downsides are significant. The federal government might not immediately reopen, there’s no guarantee Republicans would stop using the debt limit as leverage in the future and Obama could find himself in the same position once the temporary extension expires.

And yet, Obama may have little choice but to accept House Speaker John Boehner’s offer because it delivers what the president wants: a debt limit hike with no ideological strings attached.

“If a clean debt limit bill is passed, he would likely sign it,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday. “The key is they don’t get anything in exchange.”

The big question for the White House and Republicans in Congress is the definition of the word “clean.” It may be that the White House has to look at yesterday’s shirt — presentable, if not just-starched — as clean enough.

The White House is holding out hope that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will be able to push a longer debt limit extension through his chamber with some Republican support, putting pressure on the House. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is also gauging support for a variety of possible add-ons to debt limit legislation, one of which — giving the administration more flexibility to determine where sequester cuts are made — might be seen as a win for the White House.

Several Senate Republicans already have expressed skepticism over the Boehner plan. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said Congress needed to address both the government shutdown and the debt limit.

The emerging House GOP plan would come with some conditions, although not the kind of sweeping demands to defund or repeal Obamacare. Republicans would vote to lift the debt ceiling until Nov. 22 — just before Thanksgiving — while prohibiting the Treasury Department from using extraordinary measures to lift the borrowing limit.

Boehner said Republicans also would demand a formal House-Senate conference on larger budget issues, a process Senate Republicans have been blocking since their Democratic counterparts approved a budget resolution earlier this year.

“What we want to do is to offer the president today the ability to move a temporary increase in the debt ceiling, an agreement to go to conference on the budget, for his willingness to sit down and discuss with us a way forward to reopen the government, and to start to deal with America’s pressing problems,” Boehner said.

“It’s time for leadership,” he continued. “I would hope that the president would look at this as an opportunity and a good-faith effort on our part to move halfway — halfway to what he’s demanded in order to have these conversations begin.”

Carney declined to take a position on the plan, noting that the White House hadn’t yet seen the specifics. But he also did not rule it out immediately.

“We haven’t seen a bill yet,” he said of Boehner’s as-yet-unwritten proposal. “We don’t know what he can pass.”

The major upside to Thursday’s developments is that Obama would dodge economic catastrophe — for a few weeks, at least. The government shutdown is bad, but a default on U.S. debt would be so much worse.